For over a decade marketers have debated whether email marketing died. Plot twist; the monster is alive. The death of email marketing was expected because of the rise in its counterparts (social, paid, organic). Marketers thought that if information was readily available in these other channels, there’s no need for email marketing.
The reality? Email grew.
It grew because of its unrivalled personalisation. Which is only achievable because of the opted-in information provided by users. Businesses are able to tailor their approaches based on the interests, interactions and data that their customers provide to them.
Now, for the purpose of this blog. Where’s the power and how can you actually harness it?
When you begin email marketing, it’s important to have a clean database. Your user hygiene will determine how powerful your outcomes can be.
What do we mean by this?
Well, when you’re collecting user data, you need to make sure your fields are properly mapped and you’re leveraging tags and segments. The cheat-code way of thinking about tags is that they are your user categories. For example: ‘Spent 5 minutes on X page’ or ‘Registered for X Course’. These categories allow you to create segments and send tailored comms to users that fall within these buckets.
It’s important to think of your database/userbase as your product. It needs to be maintained, cleaned and elevated in every possible way.
If the journey is non-linear, your brand presence needs to be non-linear too. Brand exposure and customer experience need to be consistent across the entire journey not just at the entry point or the moment of purchase.
Think of your messaging components as a mosaic. Each piece needs to work on its own - a standalone ad, an organic post, a product review - but they also need to form something coherent when seen together. A customer might only ever see three tiles of that mosaic before they decide. Those three tiles need to tell a consistent story.
This is where tools like dynamic ads or Performance Max campaigns become genuinely powerful. They allow multiple creative and message variations within a single campaign, letting the algorithm match the most relevant message to the right user signal at the right moment. You're not trying to control every touchpoint you're just giving the system enough good material to work with and trusting it to find the fit.
Once you have a great user base, this is where you can unleash your beast. Automations allow you to create specific pathways for your prospects (and existing customers) to increase the likelihood of acquisition and retention.
Picture your automations like a tree. You begin with your foundational paths, you know, the welcome flows, purchase flows and abandon carts. This is great to start. But, where the power lies is within your finer segmenting.
Based on your user base data, investigate and find paths that you can create to drive a user action. This is when you begin building out decision trees - the if/then scenarios. When you have enough users performing particular actions, it makes sense to automate the comms as much as possible.
This is where your tree begins growing. Your branches are expanding and your tree is taking shape. However, where most marketers fall is they take a ‘set and forget’ approach to decision trees. It’s important to review your tree, assess it and prune your branches that no longer serve a purpose.
Why, you ask?
The more branches you have, the more unruly your tree becomes and the harder to diagnose potential future problems. You want your tree like a bonsai, manicured, maintained and controlled. This will give you the best opportunity to succeed in email marketing.
Ah, to learn email marketing. Well, there are many courses out there (shout out to our own courses). While courses are great and do help a lot, I encourage you to also get in the weeds and learn by trial and error. This gives you the best opportunity to practice what you preach and learn as quickly as possible.
Ready to get started? Take our Beginnings of Email Marketing course for a certification now.
